The desire to be safe and secure—as to oneself, one's family and friends, and one's property—is fundamental. With the advent of the telegraph and telephone in the 1800's, technology allowed for the remote monitoring of a home and dramatic improvements in personal safety and security. As communication technology has improved over the years—such as with the creation of digital communications, cellular and other wireless networks, broadband and the Internet—so has the ability to protect one's home.
At the same time, these changes in technology have made personal protection more complex. People are physically more mobile today, are in their homes less, and are moving from one home to another more often. More activities are taking place outside the home, separate from one another, and via mobile devices. A person's identity, behaviors, situation, and other personal information, are becoming more and more valuable to them. Not only does this personal data need to be secure, but it can also be used to provide important insights into the health and security of individuals and their families—helping them to be more safe and secure. However, existing systems do not readily allow for an individual to fully manage and gain such insights.
The world's growing complexity is accelerating the need to better understand, manage and protect both physical assets and such personal information. Yet, there is currently no simple way for individuals to do so. Prior solutions are fragmented and isolated—typically focused on traditional protection of the home, or limited protection of an individual personally, with little insight into one's security.
Conventional means for helping to protect the physical safety of individuals while outside the home are limited—such as vehicle roadside assistance services that can connect a user with a live operator, who may also receive data on the vehicle's location and condition, or Mobile Personal Emergency Response Systems (“MPERS”). More recently, mobile phone applications have arisen that can provide the location of a person and their phone to friends and family, with some companies also having live operators to whom the person can similarly connect for roadside or other assistance. One drawback of such systems is that they do not provide the operator with any situational data beyond the location of the user or what the user is able to tell them verbally; and these systems to not enable the operator during an event (or the user subsequent to an event) to gain any insights from the past behavioral and current situational data about the user.
Existing home security systems and Personal Emergency Response Systems (“PERS”) are typically professionally installed and professionally monitored safety systems, which have the benefit of quickly and reliably providing experienced, well-trained security professionals with the information that they need to act, at any time, to protect a homeowner in the event of an emergency. But because of their sophisticated nature (these systems often use a variety of wired and wireless sensors mounted throughout the home), the installation of such security systems often makes it impractical to move them to a new location. Security systems incorporating more recent all-in-one (“AIO”) security panels, are typically less expensive and easier to install, but still may not be relocated easily, particularly depending on the sensors that are installed with the system.
Because of this, do-it-yourself (“DIY”) security kits and self-contained security units (where the various sensors, a control panel, and remote communications are integrated in a single device) have emerged that can be set-up/configured and taken down/relocated by the homeowner. If such systems are not professionally monitored, they have the significant drawback that they are completely dependent on the homeowner being available to respond when an emergency arises, timely receiving notification of the event and sufficient information about it, and knowing how to properly assess each type of emergency situation to take appropriate action both to keep their family and themselves safe and to quickly obtain the assistance of the assistance of first responders. Moreover, first responders in many locations to not directly respond to self-monitored security systems. Even if professionally monitored, such conventional DIY systems still rely on the homeowner to be sufficiently knowledgeable about the technology to be able to recognize (and have the means provided by the provider of the security product) and correct any technical issues with the system that may otherwise make monitoring unreliable or unavailable; and for the homeowner to be knowledgeable about all local codes and ordinances on the installation and operation of security systems.
Even more recently, mobile device applications have emerged that are designed to provide some basic security detection features within a smart phone or tablet itself, such as using an onboard video camera as a motion detector, and providing notification (and typically a video clip) to the user through another mobile device. While such system may be used to detect entry into an area, they suffer from some of the aforementioned drawbacks of not being professionally monitored and serviced.
Prior systems are also not “smart” in that, while they use a limited amount of personal data about the user and events that have occurred, they are not capable of analyzing this data to anticipate the user's needs. They are also not capable of incorporating broader types of personal data to enhance this analysis, such as biometric information, photos, videos, lists of personal assets, characteristics, usage information, browsing history, etc. Such personal data can be created by individuals themselves (such as in profiles on social media or various smart phone applications); captured by others (such as Web site data or location data when using mobile devices), or data about people crafted from analysis of offered and/or captured data (such as credit scores and other data gathering services). All of this data could provide beneficial insights that can be used to better anticipate the user's needs.
Further, these prior systems are typically limited to one type of monitoring, namely, premises monitoring or personal safety monitoring. For example, as discussed above, home security systems such as AIO and some DIY security kits are directed to monitoring sensors installed at a premises. When one of the sensors are triggered, an alarm at the premises is activated to indicate a possible event at the premises. On the other hand, personal safety monitoring systems relate to using sensors built-in to a mobile device to detect one or more events such as a motion event. These two types of systems provide distinct functionally that are provided as separate systems with no interaction with one another, and receive no benefit provided from one system to the other.